Bucket List of an Idiot

by Dom Harvey

  Simone’s profile photo looked amazing—radiant, happy, content. It appeared as though the years had been way kinder to her than me! She was now married with a great family and her own business. Had I passed her in the street I reckon I would have still recognised her. She still had the same face—like an adult version of that pretty, but awkward and shy, little girl I kissed.

  I remembered our kiss so clearly. But did Simone? Or had she been lucky enough to block it out and forget about it?

  This is me at around the time of my first kiss. I did like to hang loose . . .

  always with my shirt well tucked in, though.

  I considered poking her, but that just seemed inappropriate. I mean, we had only shared a kiss and that was three decades ago. It just did not seem right to blindside her with a poke from out of the blue. I decided to send her a message instead, to see if she remembered me—which she did.

  It was nice to get talking to Simone again, reminiscing about old times, and eventually I broached the subject of the kiss. Simone kindly agreed to write up her version of events for this book. All in all, both stories are pretty similar:

  My first kiss was with Dominic Harvey, almost thirty years ago, on the banks of the Manawatu River. A group of us including Jeremy Walker and Crystal Budd had decided to go to what was called the ‘Love Pit’, a child-made bower of branches nestled in the bush but within view of the river. This was a popular destination where kissing and smooching experiments took place, conducted predominantly by young children at Riverdale Primary School.

  I was nervous and apprehensive as the four of us made our way to the Love Pit one sunny day after school, but I wanted to seem confident. I remember Dominic being shy, like me (in fact, I don’t think any words were passed between us), and me thinking that Dominic didn’t fancy me one bit but had only come along for the ride because Jeremy had pressured him into it.

  Jeremy and Crystal seemed like old hats at the kissing thing and looked very comfortable with each other as we counted ourselves down to the big moment. 3, 2, 1 . . . bang! Our teeth collided, a very awkward moment indeed, and we kissed clumsily for about three or four seconds. For both of us a very disappointing and embarrassing situation! I turned to watch Crystal and Jeremy’s lingering kisses and they looked like seasoned professionals.

  Jeremy then suggested we swap partners and see who could kiss the longest—this being my first introduction to what would later be known as a ‘foursome’. At that moment, I turned to see Dominic take off at a rapid pace, out of the bush—was I really that bad, I thought? The feeling of rejection then was tenfold! I now realise Dominic was actually a terrified deer running for his life!

  Unfortunately, there was no passion or romance about my first kiss but I’m glad this memory was shared with Dominic, as he continues to crack me up every morning on the radio and I still remember him being the same from Palmy school days.

  I have zero recollection of the patch of grass we were standing on being called the ‘Love Pit’—it sounds very grown-up. Nor do I remember Jeremy’s suggestion that we swap partners and have a contest! But the other details seem to be more or less the same.

  After reading Simone’s version of events I picked my nephew up from school. Coincidentally, he is now nine, the same age I was when all this took place. As we walked through the grounds of his school, a few girls spoke to him—some said hi, some said bye. It did make me wonder what these little brats get up to when no grown-ups are about to supervise. Kids these days seem to grow up so much faster and have so much more exposure to information than we did when I was the same age.

  We got in the car and my nephew asked, ‘Dom, when we get home can I get my scooter and go down to the park to play for a while?’

  ‘What do you want to do down there, mate?’ I enquired.

  ‘Just play cricket,’ he replied.

  ‘Who with?’ I asked.

  ‘Just some friends from my class.’

  I paused.

  ‘Will any girls be there?’

  ‘No. I don’t really like playing with girls all that much.’

  That was a relief. If there was such a thing as a correct answer, that was it. Then, just as I was about to tell him he could go to the park, he spoke again, forcing me to rethink my decision. ‘A lot of girls in my class have crushes on me, though.’

  ‘You know what, buddy?’ I replied. ‘I think we’ll just stay at home and play today, eh?’

  ASK FOR A THREESOME

  You are probably thinking: ‘How the hell is this something bad? What red-blooded guy wouldn’t want a threesome? It sounds like a fantasy!’

  I wholeheartedly agree with all of that.

  But if, like me, you are a married man who is no stranger to having a thumb print on your forehead, even bringing up this topic could land you in serious trouble. Asking for a threesome could be as risky as skydiving with a chute that has been packed by a one-armed man.

  If I could get this one over the line, it would be amazing and the reward would be the stuff of legends. But the potential danger was in bringing it up in the first place.

  Yeah, yeah, I know about the risks—jealousy could creep in, things could be weird afterwards, the dynamics of the marriage could change, blah blah blah. But they were risks I was prepared to deal with IF they arose.

  So there we were, sitting in the office at home on a Friday afternoon in winter when I plucked up the courage to bring it up. ‘So, you know this book I’m working on? I think we should have a threesome and I can write about it as one of the chapters.’

  I sat there and held my breath, expecting the worst but hoping for the best, like a scene in a Keanu Reeves movie where he has to choose to cut the red or green wire to try and defuse the bomb.

  The response came after about three seconds of thoughtful silence:

  ‘NO. FUCKING. WAY!’

  Stink! I snipped the wrong wire.

  They were three of the shortest and most emphatic sentences a wife could say. And the way she said it, it was definitely three individual sentences and definitely worthy of being printed with caps lock on.

  Jay-Jay’s response was firm and final. I was gutted. Not with her but with myself.

  My approach had been all wrong. Perhaps I should have bided my time, taken her out for dinner and brought it up as she neared the end of her second, or even third, strawberry daiquiri. It made me wonder how guys who have threesomes have threesomes. What was the secret? I know I lack the looks, charisma, sex appeal and all-round coolness that some guys possess but I honestly thought presenting the idea as ‘a bit of research for my book’ might just get it past the line.

  What a dick—I’ve read enough Cleos over the years to know that women need to be romanced.

  I didn’t expect my wife to jump at the suggestion and immediately go through her Facebook friends to bounce around names of a potential third party. But I would have been satisfied with any of the following responses:

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Can we talk about this later?’

  ‘You, me and who else?’

  ‘Would the third person be a guy or a girl?’

  ‘All right. But only if I can choose the person.’

  Those last two would have made me a bit nervous, though. It could indicate she was devising some evil plan to teach me a lesson.

  Like most guys I had thought about a threesome. And like most guys my threesome fantasies always involved me being the only man in the room.

  Some guys may disagree with me and argue that the M-M-F combination is a good and legitimate form of male bonding. Not me though—I am greedy and not really fond of competition so it had to be F-F-M. Especially after a friend of mine shared with me a threesome horror story that I have never been able to block out.

  Away on a rugby trip, my mate was out drinking with one of his teammates when they met a girl who suggested they all go back to her place. My friend and his teammate jumped at the opportunity and
the three of them caught a taxi back to her place. They all sat in the back seat of the cab, where a show was put on that made it hard for the driver to concentrate on the road in front of him.

  When they arrived at the woman’s house they went straight to her bedroom, removed the items of clothing they still had on and got down to business.

  The guys insisted on leaving the light on so they could maintain a respectable distance from each other but what happened next was unavoidable—even with ample lighting.

  My friend, a fierce competitor, finished first and accidentally misfired a glob of sperm on his teammate’s thigh.

  Both my mate and the girl involved were able to see the comedy in what happened and laughed relentlessly. The man in white was not so good-natured about it.

  ‘Fucking hell! Get a towel! Get a towel!’ he shouted in the panicked tone you would expect from someone who just noticed a poisonous snake crawling on their leg.

  Still laughing, my mate got up and grabbed something to assist with the clean-up. And that was the end of the liaison. Short and bittersweet.

  I believe the taxi ride back to the hotel felt a lot longer and way less jovial than the ride to the house.

  A few days after raising the topic for the first time we were driving somewhere when the nonsensical and heavily auto-tuned song ‘Three’ by Britney Spears came on the radio. I seized my moment and broached the subject again as naturally as I could. ‘Hey, you know how this song is all about threesomes? Well, I’ve started writing that chapter of my book about having one.’

  ‘Have you?’ the wife replied. ‘How are you going to do that? Will you just make it up?’

  ‘Nah, I can’t make it up,’ I protested, as if I was penning some book of great literary importance. ‘We’re just going to have to bite the bullet and do it. Like Britney said—merrier the more.’

  Then there was a lengthy pause. It felt like a thinking pause rather than an I’m-so-mad-at-you-right-now pause, which was promising.

  I broke the silence: ‘It’ll be fun. I reckon you’ll love it. I’ll get you a bit pissed first.’

  ‘Not happening,’ she replied. ‘I’m too old and too sensible now—you should have met me in my early twenties! I would have been up for it then. Plus I don’t even find any of your friends remotely attractive.’

  It was good news that she wasn’t into any of my mates, but things weren’t looking promising. Typical! I should have known this would be the outcome. One of the only things on my list that I was real keen to do and it would be the one thing I would not be able to do.

  Please don’t feel sorry for me, though. I didn’t completely miss out on the group sex thing. Prior to getting married, there was one occasion where I made up 25 per cent of a foursome. But before you conjure up delightful soft-focus mental images along the lines of Hugh Hefner and three girls from the Playboy mansion all rolling together on a giant four-poster bed, I should warn you this encounter was far less spectacular.

  I was twenty-one and still working as the midnight to 6 am announcer at 2XS FM in Palmerston North. That was all about to change though—an intern had been employed from the Christchurch Polytech radio course to take over the graveyard shift, allowing me to be promoted to the coveted breakfast slot.

  My favourite clothes when I was twenty-one. 2XS FM fluoro sweatshirt

  tucked into my grey Barkers trackies. Great for jogging in the dark, not so

  great for impressing the ladies.

  On the 7 pm to midnight shift just before me was Iain Stables. Stables went on to earn a reputation as a shock jock but back then we were both just young guys living our dreams—getting to talk on the radio and play songs for a living.

  Stables had a deep voice, perfectly suited to the craft of radio. I think it’s fair to say he had a face that suited the craft as well. Nevertheless, he was a phenomenal hit with the ladies. In 2011 he publicly claimed he had slept with 500 women. This may sound like an exaggerated number to some. But I reckon that could even be a conservative estimate.

  On my very last night as the midnight to six announcer I was training up the new intern, Brian Reid, when Stables burst into the studio,

  ‘Dom, do you want to go on a road trip to Otaki, mate?’

  Stables was impulsive. And always up to something.

  Whenever he asked a question like that it never meant that weekend, or later on. It always meant right away.

  I asked anyway, ‘When? Now?’

  ‘Yeah, now. We’ll get the radio station van, fill it up with the Caltex card, and go down! I’ve got to go and see a girl and she’s got a friend who likes your voice!’

  There was no way I could go. I had to stay to train up the new guy and I told Stables as much.

  ‘Nah, he’ll be okay. We’ll be gone for three hours tops. An hour there, stay for an hour, an hour back.’

  He was very persuasive and I was hardly in a position to be turning down the opportunity to sleep with a stranger who thought I had a nice voice.

  I gave Brian, the new intern, a crash course into how to work the two compact disc players in the 2XS FM studio and Stables and myself hit the road in the radio station van, listening to the broadcast on the way down to ensure the new guy didn’t take the whole station off the air.

  We arrived at the girl’s house in Otaki and introduced ourselves.

  A scenario like this would be far too uncomfortable for me to ever contemplate but Stables took charge of the situation. ‘All right, we better get into this. Dom has to get back to train up this new guy.’

  The girls led us down to a bedroom with two single beds. Stables hopped into one with the girl he had been chatting to on the phone during his night show. I got into the other little bed with the girl who allegedly liked the sound of my voice. I can’t imagine why she liked it. Doing the midnight to 6 am slot I was restricted to three to four very short voice breaks an hour and it was a fairly tight format. So the only things I would be talking about would be info about the new music and details about upcoming station promotions—things like big digs, a raft race, concerts or kite days. I reckon even someone with a really awesome voice—Morgan Freeman, for example—would struggle to pull the chicks if all he was doing was saying things like:

  2XS FM at 2.37 am, that’s new music for Marc Cohn, a song called ‘Walking in Memphis’. The 2XS FM annual big dig is being held at Himatangi Beach this Sunday at 10 am. Registrations are $2 and you could win major prizes like an Akai 14-inch TV or an Ansett mystery escape. So come on down and join in the fun, registrations from 9 am. Here’s Amy Grant and ‘Baby, Baby’ on 2XS FM.

  Still, I was not going to argue if she wanted to sleep with me. I was just glad to have the opportunity.

  The two single beds were separated by a small table with a radio on it, which I switched on to keep an ear on things back at the studio a hundred kilometres away.

  My encounter was very brief, maybe a song and a half.

  Stables and his new-found friend were considerably longer, which left me and the girl I was in the single bed with nothing to do but indulge in awkward small talk like you would have in a lift with a stranger, and watch our two friends in the next bed.

  The song on the radio faded out. I remember this more vividly than the actual sexual encounter. It was ‘I Saw the Sign’ by Ace of Base. Then, nothing. Just the horrible static hiss of dead air. The worst sound a broadcaster can hear.

  I climbed over the naked girl who liked the sound of my voice and sat naked on the side of the bed and hit the top of the radio a couple of times, as if that was going to somehow get sound coming from the speaker again. By now there had been silence for the best part of a minute and I was starting to panic.

  Then from the dead air came a voice break:

  ‘Ummm. Hello? Hi. This is 2XS FM and my name is Brian Reid. I’m new here and today’s my first day. I’m supposed to be being trained by Dominic Harvey but him and Iain Stables have gone for a drive somewhere. If Dominic is listening or if anybody knows
where he is, can you please give me a call urgently? The CD is stuck in player 2 and I can’t get it out!’

  We had two CD players in the studio, which were used to produce seamless music sweeps. With only one functioning, it would mean after a song played, Brian would have to eject the disc from that player, then insert the next song and cue it up. This whole process would mean there was anywhere up to forty seconds of dead air between songs.

  I was naked and freaking out. My warm afterglow as a result of intercourse with a new partner had completely vanished. Now I was crippled with fear. ‘I’m going to lose my fucking job. If Steve is listening, he’s going to fire me for this!’

  Steve was Steve Rowe, the station manager. And he was one of those bosses that would listen to his radio station at very odd hours. Combine this with the knowledge that he had hired me against his better judgement because his wife liked my CV and suddenly my future as a radio DJ was hanging in the balance.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ Stables said without even pausing what he was in the middle of. It was easy for him to say. He would be in a little bit of trouble for taking the van on such a long trip for non-work-related activity. But I would be in a world of shit for this. My promising radio career was just starting out, I had just managed to have sex with my very first fan, and now the dream would be over.

  I borrowed the landline at the house and called the radio station. Fortunately, I was able to talk Brian through what he needed to do to get the stuck CD out of the player. It was a crude process that involved using a steak knife to prise open the tray. It was something that happened occasionally, so a knife was kept in the studio solely for this reason. It was a very Number 8 wire way to fix some pricey broadcast gear but it did the trick.